REAL-LIFE ‘LUANN’ NOW COWRITING FAMED COMIC STRIP

Cartoonist’s daughter lending a hand, thinking up new adventures for animated teenager

September 19, 2013, San Marcos, California, USA_|Detail view of “Luann” cartoonist Greg Evans working in his studio in his San Marcos home. He uses Adobe Photoshop on a McIntosh computer to draw the comic.| Photo Credit: Photo by Charlie Neuman/UT San Diego/Copyright 2013 San Diego Union-Tribune, LLC

September 19, 2013, San Marcos, California, USA_|Detail view of “Luann” cartoonist Greg Evans working in his studio in his San Marcos home. He uses Adobe Photoshop on a McIntosh computer to draw the comic.| Photo Credit: Photo by Charlie Neuman/UT San Diego/Copyright 2013 San Diego Union-Tribune, LLC

SAN MARCOS 
Twenty-eight years after inspiring the title character in Greg Evans’ long-running comic strip “Luann,” the San Marcos cartoonist’s daughter, Karen, is working by her father’s side as the strip’s co-author.

Although he has no immediate plans to retire, the 65-year-old Evans says he takes great comfort in knowing that Luann — a dreamy, overdramatic high school senior — will carry on without him one day in very safe hands.

“I grew up with these characters,” said Karen Evans, a 34-year-old San Marcos resident whose day job is dean of students at Magnolia Science Academy, a charter middle school in La Mesa. “When I think of Luann and Brad and the others, they are like family members who I have known my entire life.”

Greg Evans said he always dreamed of being a cartoonist, but couldn’t find a buyer for his hand-drawn strips in his 20s and early 30s, so he bounced around in a series of jobs — high school art teacher in El Centro, TV news camera operator in Colorado Springs and talking-robot operator at the San Diego Zoo and Seaport Village. Then one day in 1984, he saw 5-year-old Karen, the youngest of his three children with wife, Betty, walking around their Twin Oaks Valley home dressed in her mom’s clothing and jewelry.

“I saw her and I got the idea for a strip about a little girl, and for once it struck a chord because it wasn’t a contrived subject. It was drawn from real life,” said Evans, who decided to name the character “Luann” and aged her to 13, because teen angst would provide more fodder for storylines. On March 17, 1985, “Luann” launched and is still going strong. The syndicated strip now appears in 450 newspapers and websites
(gocomics.com), and is read by more than 600,000 online visitors each week. In 2003, Evans won the industry’s highest accolade, the National Cartoonist Society’s Reuben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year. And in 2006, Evans premiered a musical based on the strip, “Luann: Scenes in a Teen’s Life.”

In the early years of “Luann,” Evans said he drew plot ideas from teen magazines and, later, Karen’s own experiences getting her ears pierced, wearing braces and entering high school. Betty served as a constant sounding board for plot and character ideas, and Karen said she would occasionally see names of friends and funny stories from the dinner table end up in her father’s strip.

But Evans said he was always careful to give Luann and her cartoon family — older brother, Brad, and parents, Frank and Nancy DeGroot — lives of their own.

Twelve years ago, Luann matured to the age of 16, and this year, she entered her senior year of high school and got her first steady boyfriend. Meanwhile, Brad became a firefighter and, after a long, stormy courtship, is now engaged to fellow firefighter Toni Daytona.

For several years, Evans said he had wondered what would happen to “Luann” when he eventually retires. He considered ending the strip as Charles M. Schulz did with “Peanuts,” or contracting an illustrator/writer to take over. He also considered having his children carry on the legacy, but Karen said she and her siblings — sister Rhonda, 44, of Texas, and brother Gary, 37, of Ventura — didn’t inherit their father’s artistic talent.